Buddy, a very large part of my job is locking down Linux as much as possible while still allowing it to do it’s job. I can confidently say that not locking things down was a decision that was made, not a restraint of the system they used.
I’m not saying that they didn’t lock it down to allow piracy, which is actually a really dumb take. They probably did it to allow moding and allow it to be used as a desktop.